Sheep Guarding Llama

I was awake at six thirty this morning but couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed so I decided to sleep until eight. I got up and drove into the office. I don’t like this commuting thing, it isn’t fun. I was appreciating being able to work from home most of the past month. That was really great.

I almost forgot that we have a holiday coming up on us quite quickly. Dominica and I are going to Waverly, New York for one day this weekend although we don’t know the exact schedule yet. She has family coming in from California that she hasn’t seen in probably ten years so we are going up there to visit. It isn’t too far of a drive from down here. I don’t get a long weekend for the holiday but I do get Tuesday off.

It was a Thai lunch day. Lunch was quite good. I spent a bit of the afternoon working on the Hewlett-Packard classes that I am currently taking and am a week or two behind on. I got caught up on my Network Attached Storage class and worked on my Project Management class.

The other day Dominica and I were talking about some people that I went to college with and I thought of Gabe Bolt who lived across the hall from me at GMI in Flint, Michigan (now Kettering University.) I hadn’t thought about Gabe in years. So I did a quick search for him online and, like most of the people that I went to college with in Michigan, his only online presence that I could find was from our old college days. Apparently Gabe went on to found the Kettering Chapter of Delta Chi. That is the only Google reference to Gabe’s full name anywhere. I did a further search under his full name Gabriel Bolt and only got his master’s degree graduation information from Oakland University. That is all the Internet knows about Gabe Bolt. Soon, if someone does a search again, the top reference to him is very likely to be SGL. Maybe someday he will do a search for himself and find this page and leave a comment and I will know how to get a hold of him. If you are a friend of Gabe’s drop a note. I can’t get it to him but maybe someday he will check in and see that you left a note. Ah, the power of the Internet.

Wil Wheaton is hanging in Prince Edward Island today – one of my favourite places anywhere. And he even went and got ice cream from Cows of Prince Edward Island – my favourite ice cream place. Too bad he was only able to go to Charlottetown and didn’t get to explore the island which actually gets much better as you leave the city nor did he get to get ice cream at the REAL Cows up in Cavendish.

Originally Dominica and I had been planning on going down to Maryland next weekend to visit but instead Dominica is helping Francesca drive Madeline and Emily back down to Houston. So I am driving Min up to Geneseo on Friday night where we will spend the night – I think. Then Francesca will come through on Saturday and pick Dominica up and off they will go for another fun two days of driving. I will spend the weekend getting servers ready in Geneseo. Oh the excitement. But it will give me a chance to visit and an opportunity to spend time with Oreo. I will return to New Jersey on Sunday and Dominica will fly in on Monday night. (This is not this coming weekend but the following weekend of July 9th.)

We were sort of hoping that the BMW 330ci convertible would be ready today so that we could go and take a look at it and give Dominica a chance to drive it but they didn’t call so we are assuming that it isn’t ready yet. Today was the earliest that it was going to be ready so there is a decent chance that it will be ready tomorrow. We are very excited about it but it is a lot of money so we also appreciate having an additional day before we need to make any decisions.

Speaking of cars, it looks as though my Mazda RX-7 convertible is going to be towed down to Ithaca in about two weeks. The plan is to have Autoworks take a serious look at it and get together a plan for getting it running again. I figure that it will not be cheap and it will have to happen in stages. Right away we will just have to try to get the thing running again. It has been sitting idle for the past four years which is a really long time for a car to sit. It is going to be needing every consumable component replaced right down to the wires, tires, gaskets, seats, roof, etc. No small project. And that isn’t even dealing with the engine and powertrain. Heaven only knows how much damage has been done there. I just know that it is going to be bad. But that car is awesome and I want to be able to drive it again. Even if we don’t decide to get the BMW we would still like our third car to be a working one.

Work was super slow this evening so I headed for home not long after five. That was a nice change. I called Dominica and she was going to meet me at Tanjore for some Indian cooking, but when she went to leave the apartment she had some emergency brake lights on so she couldn’t drive her car. Well, she could but she shouldn’t. So I drove down to the apartment and picked her up before we went to dinner. Tanjore was closed when we got there so we ate some ice cream next door as a before dinner dessert while we waited for the restaurant to open.

For dinner we decided to be brave and try a new type of Indian dish that we had never had before called dosai. Dosai is a crepe like food stuffed with different types of fillings. Dominica tried a spinach dosai and I had a rava dosai which was a specialty of the house. The dosai was really awesome and very filling. We were totally stuffed after eating. It was much heavier than it looked. We have been seeing people get dosai often when we are at Tanjore but we have never known quite what it was or how to order it. Now, I expect, we will be ordering it all of the time.

After dinner we just came home and relaxed. I did a little work for one of our customers in Ithaca that Dominica had been working with during the day. It was not a stressful evening.

Pulling myself out of bed this morning was quite the chore. Dominica and I didn’t get to bed until around one in the morning. I was awake at six but my body was tired and made me stay in bed for some time longer. I finally pulled myself out of bed and went to the office.

It feels strange being back in the office again. I haven’t been on days full time sitting at my desk doing my regular job in over a month! That might seem like a vacation to a lot of you but remember that I have only been here for a little under three months so far so having an entire month of doing something different really throws things out of whack pretty easily.

As of today I am on regular daytimes all of the time. We thought that I was still going to do another one or two overnights yet this week but that ended up not happening which is pretty much a relief. I like overnights but I don’t like doing them right after having worked all day. We had been planning on me switching to starting at four in the morning and working until early afternoon but that was cancelled today and I am just going to be on regular daytimes. At least that is the story for today. It would appear to change every day.

I didn’t get a chance to head for home until pretty late – after seven in the evening. That makes for a really short night. I didn’t get home until eight. Dominica and I ordered some Domino’s pizza and watched The Trouble with Harry by Alfred Hitchcock that I love from my childhood but Dominica has never seen before. She thought that it was really good.

Near the end of the movie the pizza delivery guy finally arrived and explained that he had been robbed or something and that someone had taken our pizza. So Domino’s rushed another delivery guy out with new pizzas for us and only charged us half. So it took a while but we ate cheap tonight.

We had some time to wait for the pizza so we watched the first half of Elizabethtown that Dominica’s mother had recommended. It was a quiet evening and I pretty much just took some time to work on entering movie data into the movie database system.

I was extremely tired all night tonight as I worked the overnight support shift. It is a good thing that I get to work from home because I am too tired to drive safely. The night seemed to pass rather quickly but this is probably a result of the delirium and not from there being some activity to help the time pass. I got practically nothing done during the night as I was unable to concentrate on anything at all.

I wrapped up my shift at eight in the morning and went straight to bed. I was so tired.

I slept until one or a little afterwards. Once I got up and moving Dominica and I went to the Omega Diner and got some dinner or maybe it was a late lunch. It was a nice day and we wanted to find out what we thought of the Cooper Mini so we drove down to Princeton on Route 1 and went to the Cooper Dealer down there. What we discovered is that the Mini’s really are mini and are way too small for us. It might as well be a two seater for all the space that you get in the back seat. We thought that they were cute and the front seat seemed to be decently comfortable but overall it just was not a reasonable car for us. Especially not at close to $30,000.

While we were there we walked to the other side of the building and looked at the BMW’s. Cooper is a division of BMW so they are almost always in the same places. The dealer had a load of used convertibles on the lot so we got to look around quite a bit. We took a test drive in a 2005 325ci convertible and we fell in love with it. The ride is so smooth and the interior is so quiet. It is a really gorgeous car. We talked to the dealer about options and prices. They have a 2004 330cic convertible expected around Wednesday that we are really interested in. We are planning on coming back then to take a look at it. The 325 and the 330 are the same car but the 330 has a larger engine. We are definitely 330 type people. We have to look at cars that are automatic only because we are going to, if we get a car like this, get rid of both of our Mazda main driving cars now – the 2002 PR5 and the 2003 6. If we didn’t have to get an automatic I would be seriously looking at the M3 but that only comes in stick and Dominica can’t drive that. So what we are thinking is that we might be able to sell the PR5, trade in the 6, get the 330 and put my RX-7 back onto the road as our second car just for those times when I need to drive to work and Dominica needs the Beamer. We will see. The real issue is the incredible hassle that is likely to occur from buying a car in New Jersey. It might not even be feasible. But boy is that a nice car. We loved it. And it would, most likely, not cost us any more than the two of our cars are costing us now.

Dad bought a Mercury Grand Marquis in Batavia and is planning on picking it up tomorrow. Not quite the convertible that he had been hoping for.

We did a little miscellaneous shopping on the way home and then just spent the evening relaxing. I am back on days tomorrow at work and I need to prepare for the time shift. We tried ordering some pizza at eleven in the evening and discovered that just everything down here closes really early. We called everywhere and there was just no way that we were going to be able to get any pizza. We were both hungry so we just decided to go over to the Omega even though it was late.

Today’s update is being written on board the Amtrak Empire Serivce train 281 running from New York’s Penn Station to Utica. So let me start the update by getting you up to date with the events from yesterday.

I left off the update yesterday at seven in the morning. That is when I called the taxi company to send a cab to the apartment. To my surprise it took them less than five minutes to get someone there. How handy. He got me right into New Brunswick. It took so little time that I was there significantly earlier than I had anticipated. Do I ran into Dunkin Donuts and grabbed iced latte and a cheese danish. I went up to the platform to eat and wait.

It turns out that I was so early that I actually managed to grab an earlier train than I had planned on. I was originally going to get on the eight o’clock train on New Jersey Transit but since I was all ready at the station I hopped onto the seven thirty train getting me to Penn Station around a quarter after eight. That didn’t really save me any time because I still had to wait until nine forty five to get onto Amtrak. So I went to the Amtrak waiting area and sat there for a while. At least I had plenty of time to relax and didn’t have to worry about anything.

I got to talking with a youth group from Morgantown, West Virginia that were getting ready to return home after a week in Manhattan. We had a good time talking and it passed the time. Falling into the “it’s a small world” category – the guy that I was talking to asked me if I knew a person in Pittsburgh and managed to come up, in a single shot, with someone that I know extemely well, have seen within the last eight weeks and will talk to again within a few weeks. Weird!

I got onto the Amtrak train without a hassle. This is the first time that I have ridden Amtrak in many years. I would guess a dozen years or more most likely. I forgot how comfortable it is to ride on Amtrak. The seats are great, there is nice air conditioning (better than the apartment,) and my own personal power port to plug my laptop into. It is great.

I was dumb and didn’t think to bring DVDs with me to watch on the trip. I hadn’t thought about the fact that I would probably be able to use the laptop. But, even though I am dumb, I had forgotten to remove the DVD of Magnum P.I. from the player from watching it last night. That was a stroke of luck. There was one episode of Magnum P.I. left so I at least had that to watch. I was extremely happy when I discovered that it was a special two hour episode instead of the regular one hour. That was a big time bonus. The DVD also had demo episodes of Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff and The A*Team. Hey, when you are on a train with nothing to do you get desperate. I was prepared and had headphones with me. The train was sold to capacity so there were no spare seats available. Having the DVD player on the train really makes the time go fast. It is much easier to watch movies on the train than in a car or on a plane (I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I Am.)

It is strange to me to think about how prevalent the Vietnam War was when I was a child. The war ended, officially – whatever that means when no war was ever declared, before I was born but it was such a long and dramatic war that in the early 1980’s when I was growing up it was still fresh in the minds of adults. To children my age it seemed like something from history long ago. Much like the first Gulf War must be to my younger cousins but now that I am older Vietnam seems almost to have been a part of my early childhood. I probably feel the same way about Vietnam that dad feels about World War II. WWII was definitely more dramatic to everyone but Vietnam affected American consciousness so much that the effects must be similar. Far more similar than the Korean War or probably WWI would have been.

The ride north along the Hudson River is a beautiful one. Being from western New York and having spent almost no time near the Hudson I am inclined to forget what the eastern part of the state looks like. It is no wonder that the New Netherlands Colony sprung up along this waterway. The Hudson is such a completely different world than I am used to in New York. The eastern half of the state is much more similar to the mid-Atlantic regions of the country like New Jersey and Maryland than it is like western New York which is more similar to Pennsylvania – not so much in terrain where it is pretty unique but in lifestyle. The Hudson is expensive and upscale while western New York is extremely inexpensive and rural. As I ride up the Hudson Valley I can sure understand why such a huge percentage of Upstate’s population chooses to live along this waterway.

As I rode along watching out the eastern side view on the train with a overcast, dreary day I couldn’t help but notice that the river swamps on the east side of the Hudson and the wooded hills in the background look an awful lot like parts of Vietnam that you see in movies all of the time. You could just imagine the swamps being used as paddies. Weird that I have never noticed that before. You could definitely film a Vietnam movie along the Hudson and fool a lot of people pretty easily.

So I came up with something totally awesome to do with my laptop while riding on the train today. I remembered to pull out my GPS unit and I attached it to the train window. I pulled up Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 and set it to GPS Tracking. Now I am able to see exactly where the train is on the map with a history of our travels, information including the direction that we are currently facing so that I can determine what I am seeing out of the windows as well as our current speed! How cool is that? You don’t get that on an airplane – yet. This makes the trip a lot more fun. Maybe for those of you who are not as into maps as dad, Nate and I it wouldn’t be so cool but this is a great way to teach map reading too. This is one of the best ideas that I have had in a long time. I am going to do this all of the time now whenever I travel by train. It really adds something to the ride.

I watched the one demo episode of Knight Rider that was on the DVD in the player. If I ever wondered whether or not I might want to buy that show that episode definitely answered that question for me. That show was crap. There is no writing in it at all. They just have a “situation” and the car produces whatever magic is necessary to fix it. No matter what. Even when they had to do a prison break they just flew in with the car (and by fly I mean they flew,) used the car as a bullet proof shield for its inhabitants (even thought the windows were down) and then flew the open windowed vehicle right on out of the prison?!? Who wrote that? Then, later they made the car travel 47.5 miles in under 8 minutes – which is an mean average speed of 352 miles per hour. And yet driving at that speed they were unable to out run the Chevy Impala cop cars that were chasing them. And everytime we saw the car it was doing about 130 mph so it must have been doing over 1,000 mph all of the time that we weren’t watching. Funny how those cops kept up. Not only that but they had time to stop the car, drop off a bomb and drive away all within those eight minutes. So make that 1,500 mph. They didn’t even mention the obvious sound barrier issues with all of those cop cars keeping up with them. The whole thing was just dumb.

Albany is so beautiful from the Hudson. Albany is the nation’s third oldest city (after St. Augustine, Florida and Santa Fe, New Mexico – making it the oldest non-Spanish speaking city) and is just loaded with history and charm. It is strange that in some ways Albany is such a small city but it really seems large. It has much more “big city” feel than do any of the other Upstate cities like Buffalo, Rochester or Syracuse which are all larger. Albany has the serious downtown area that makes it feel like a real city.

While I was riding on the train I overhead a girl in front of me talking on her mobile phone about reading how they are trying to use dog droppings from dog parks to make fuel. I think she was talking to someone in college who was writing a paper about doing that. All I could think of was Jared Diamond’s point in his book Collapse where he talked about the use of feces as a fuel as an indicator of a society within its final days before total breakdown. This is caused by society choosing to turn fertilizer into heat rather than putting necessary nutrients back into the ground. Once you go down that road collapse accelerates as the soil depletes and the need to produce fuel increases as the supply decreases through the creation process.

We had some signal issues on the route that CSX (formally Chessie System) had to deal with that cost us some time. Amtrak was doing what they could to make up the time and at one point my GPS system clocked the train at 111 mph! (Apparently fast enough to keep up with the “super car” in Knight Rider. I didn’t know that Amtrak was able to push their trains so fast. That is really hauling. It is no wonder that they are able to make the trip from New York to Utica so quickly. I thought that the trains only did about fifty miles an hour most of the time but they definitely go a lot faster than that the bulk of the time.

When we left Schenectady they announced that we were running almost forty minutes behind schedule and that we would not be arriving in Utica until 2:40. I called Dominica because she was just about to leave to go to the station.

As we went through the eastern Mohawk Valley we had a little red Honda Insite running alongside of us with the driver trying to get the train to blow its horn. It was pretty funny looking.

The train ended up running extremely late. I was scheduled to arrive at two o’clock but didn’t actually end up arriving until almost four! I have heard from Bob Winans that Amtrak often runs very late along this route because it is primarily a CSX freight line and the passenger traffic is secondary. Dominica and Joe got stuck waiting in the car with Oreo for over an hour waiting of the train to get in. Fortunately I had the GPS with me so I was able to get them information about where we are. That worked out really well.

We went right over to Erica’s graduation party. We were there all afternoon. I played some badmitten too. The weather was pretty good. There was tons of rain to the south but Frankfort was bright and sunny.

We went out to get some ice cream at a place called Dave’s. They have really good ice cream.

On Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast with the Toccos. Most of the family left around noon to go to a picnic at a park about an hour away. Dominica, Joe and I stayed behind. Dominica and I would have headed for home but I have to work from 1:30 until 3:00 so I need to be someplace with Internet access. I also have to work the overnight tonight so it is going to be a busy day.

We took it easy this morning. Just watching some television and having some donuts for breakfast. I started work at 1:30 and then waited for Dominica to get ready so that we could get some lunch. The work that I had to do did not require me to be at the computer most of the time so once I got things rolling we were able to go out to get some food.

We headed out into New Hartford and just grabbed a quick bite at Wendy’s. Then we went to the Cold Stone Creamery to get some ice cream. For those of you who keep telling me that there are Cold Stones all over the place and that the one in Manhattan is just part of the chain need to go to 42nd Street and try out the Cold Stone there. They treat making ice cream like it is a show – they get really into it and sing and shout and get the people there involved and excited. Going to Cold Stone in New Hartford was roughly like going to a nice Baskin Robbins. Nothing special at all.

As we were leaving Cold Stone we spotted a Hollywood Video across the street and since it had been a while since we had purchased any used movies we decided to check out the selection. We ended up getting quite a haul of eight movies including The Producers, Virginia’s Run, and a bunch more that I can’t remember.

We went back to the Tocco’s and I wrapped up my work for the day. Then we packed and headed out the door to drive back down to New Jersey. It was pretty late by the time that we finally arrived. About 11:45 which sucked because I had to be ready to work at midnight for an eight hour shift. What a long, exhausting night it is going to be.

Midnight rolled around and I wasn’t tired at all. I figure that I will just lose a night’s sleep and go to bed on the early side tomorrow. I know that I will be anxious to try out my new CPAP equipment and Oreo will be looking forward to snuggling with his daddy.

Around midnight the rains finally came that we have been being told that we were going to get for days. What a relief that is to the heat. It is only seventy five out and dropping. It is supposed to get down to seventy by morning. That will be nice. As soon as I realized that it was raining I opened up the windows. It is nice to have the fresh air again but nothing compares to not having to have the sound of the air conditioning running. My ears can’t take it anymore.

I did some cleaning around the house to get ready for Dominica’s return. Obviously I need to make the house as inviting as possible so that she might actually want to stay for a few days. We have only seen each other for about a week out of the last month. I am getting really lonely down here all by myself all of the time.

I watched some Magnum P.I. Second Season while I did some SGL work. In one episode I noticed some serious discrepencies that should have been really noticable to anyone watching this show back when it first aired. In this particular episode they have two USAF F-4 Phantoms intercept a Russian jet in US airspace (this was the height of the Cold War, remember.) Now, for modern or postmodern audiences it is important to keep in mind that knowledge of US and Russian military aircraft was widespread at the time in the general populace. It is funny looking back all these years later but as a child I definitely knew the make, models and specs of all major military aircraft. No one seems to take any notice of that stuff these days. Anyway, viewers at the time would have been very familiar with all of the aircraft in question. First of all, viewers would have known that the aging F-4 would have been a very poor choice for the USAF to have sent as an interceptor of a Russian MiG-30. Most likely these were used because they were cheap by the early 1980’s unlike the later F14, F15, F16 and F18’s that ruled the air during the 1980’s. Secondly, the F4 Phantom is one of the most recognizable aircraft ever made. No one would ever mistake one for anything else. It is one of the least generic aircraft that the US has ever had. Thirdly, the MiG-30 is not a real aircraft. MiG only ever manufactured a MiG-29 and a MiG-31 and neither of those, nor any other product from Russia, ever even remotely resembled a Phantom F4. So when in making the show they used a US Phantom F4 painted to look like Russian markings it was so obviously a US plane that audiences at the time, and me, would have been very confused by what they were showing on the screen. You couldn’t figure out where the Russian plane was supposed to be because it was so clearly all American planes in the sky. Like driving three Corvettes down the road with one of them painted in a brighter colour and hoping audiences just figure out that it was supposed to be a Porsche – so many viewers would instantly recognize it as a ‘Vette that it would never occur to you that they were trying to imply that it was something else that looks nothing like it.

Today is my big travel day. I talked to the cab company last night and they said to just call in the morning to get a cab sent out. I have to take a cab to the New Brunswick train station where I will pick up the NJ Transit train to New York – Penn Station. That is the big secret to traveling by train in and out of this area – use the NJ Transit and not Amtrak to get in and out of New York City. If you take Amtrak it will cost a lot more and won’t be nearly as convenient. The NJ Transit is less than $10 one way. Then, once in Manhattan, I will hop Amtrak to Utica. The trip won’t take very long once I am on the train. Unfortunately, there is a bit of waiting just to be sure that I have plenty of time between transfers. I have to get the cab around 7:00 am to be at the train station in plenty of time. But that will, most likely, leave me sitting at the New Brunswick Station for quite some time. Then I will ride the 8:00 train to Manhattan and be at the station about forty five minutes before the Amtrak line leaves. So I will be sitting around doing nothing for nearly three hours at that point. Then the train ride to Utica. That won’t be that much longer than the time that I will have all ready spent. I had originally planned to leave two hours earlier but the Amtrak site was down and when it came back up that train had sold out. So I am taking the later train and arriving in Utica at 2:02. Dominica and Oreo will pick me up there. Fortunately I don’t need to take any luggage with me – just my laptop bag and my CPAP. Taking my laptop and my CPAP with me also serves to empty the house and nearly everything of any value. It is handy having an empty apartment sometimes.

I managed to record episode 48 of the SGL Podcast this morning. It feels good to get a second episode done. It has been so long since I was doing the show regularly. This isn’t the most exciting episode but I wanted to take a chance to talk about Dominica and my housing decisions and planning since so many people only listen to that and don’t read the site although more do it the other way around. Just one more episode to go before the big FIVE OH! I can’t believe that I have done that many shows so far. That is crazy. And there has been a ton of good music on there too.

The night went by slowly. I was somewhat tired and somewhat bored but I couldn’t bring myself to do any real work. I got all packed and ready to get onto the train. It is going to be a long, boring travel day. I have one small book, three magazines and I did remember to pack my Sandisk Sansa MP3 player loaded with Audible books and an extra battery to make sure that I can make it the entire way. I am taking my laptop which finally has the battery with it so I might get to use that on the train as well. I have never tried to do that so that will be an experience.

For “breakfast” I heated up the crab cakes and mac and cheese that I had for dinner last night. They tasted okay reheated but not long after eating it I didn’t feel so well. Just great. Good way to start a long day of traveling.

I had to call for my taxi a little before seven this morning. I hate taking taxis. What a pain. But what are you doing to do?

I decided that since there is little chance of me getting to work any further on SGL today that I am going to go ahead and post so that at least the site is updated. It is now seven and time for me to take off.